The
Ayodhya controversy continues to drag on, with no sign of any solution
in sight. Hindutva ideologues insist that Ayodhya must be theirs alone.
Reinventing tradition and myth, they claim that Ayodhya has always been
Hindu, thus promoting it to the status of a Hindu Vatican. Yet, as critical
historians have pointed out, this claim is completely unsubstantiated.
In his slim yet insightful booklet, Communal History and Rama's Ayodhya,
Professor Ram Sharan Sharma writes, 'Ayodhya seems to have emerged as
a place of religious pilgrimage in medieval times. Although chapter
85 of the Vishnu Smriti lists as many as fifty-two places of pilgrimage,
including towns, lakes, rivers, mountains, etc., it does not include
Ayodhya in this list'. Sharma also notes that Tulsidas, who wrote the
Ramcharitmanas in 1574 at Ayodhya, does not mention it as a place of
pilgrimage.

Long before the emergence
of the cult of Rama and of Ayodhya as a place of pilgrimage in the Brahminical
tradition, the town is said to have been a major holy city for the Buddhists.
As Buddhism was forcefully challenged by Brahminical revivalists in
early medieval India, many Buddhist shrines were taken over and converted
into Hindu temples. It is thus possible that Ayodhya, too, met with
the same fate. This explains why some Buddhists today are demanding
that they be treated as an interested party in the current dispute.

The Buddhist claim is not
unfounded. According to Buddhist tradition, Ayodhya, then known as Saket
or Kosala, was a major city in the kingdom of Shuddhodhana, father of
the Buddha. The fifth century Chinese traveler Fa-Hsien visited Ayodhya
and mentioned a tooth-stick of the Buddha in the town that grew to a
length of seven cubits, which, despite being destroyed by the Brahmins,
managed to grow again. Two centuries later, another Chinese Buddhist
traveler, Hsuien Tsang, came to Ayodhya, where he noted some three thousand
Buddhist monks, with only a small number of town's other inhabitants
adhering to other faiths. At this time, Ayodhya had some one hundred
Buddhist monasteries and ten large Buddhist temples. The Hindutva argument
that Ayodhya has always been a Hindu holy city is, as this evidence
clearly suggests, patently untenable.

In the Hindutva imagination,
the relation between Muslims and Ayodhya is characterized by continuous
large-scale destruction and bloodshed. Serious historians have forcefully
challenged this image, and have pointed to the fact that the spread
of Islam and the emergence of Muslim communities in the area owed principally
not to violent invaders but, rather, to the missionary work of Sufi
saints. Considerably before the emergence of Ayodhya as the centre of
the cult of Rama, it appears that several Sufis had settled in the town
and its vicinity. With their message of love and compassion, based on
an ethical monotheism, they attracted a large number of followers, particularly
among the 'low' castes, victims of the Brahminical caste system. In
other
words, Ayodhya's association with Islam and Muslims dates to a period
much before the construction of the Babri Masjid in the sixteenth century.

As many local Muslims themselves
believe, Ayodhya is a particularly blessed town. They consider it to
be the khurd makkah or the 'small Mecca' because of the large number
of Muslim holy personages who are believed to be buried therein. These
include, or so local tradition has it, two prophets, Sheesh, son of
Adam, and Noah, or Nuh. In addition, there are said to be more than
eighty Sufi shrines or dargahs in Ayodhya. Interestingly, most of these
shrines attract both Muslim as well as Hindu devotees.

A number of Sufis made Ayodhya
their centre for spiritual teaching and instruction from as early as
the twelfth century. One of the first of these was one Qazi Qidwatuddin
Awadhi, who came to Ayodhya from Central Asia. He is said to have been
a disciple of 'Usman Haruni, the spiritual preceptor of India's most
famous Sufi saint, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer. Another great
Muslim mystic of Ayodhya of pre-Mughal times was Shaikh Jamal Gujjari,
of the Firdaussiya Sufi silsilah. According to a popular local story,
the Shaikh would regularly go out of his house carrying a large pot
of rice on his head, as the men of the Gujjar milkmen caste did, which
he would distribute among the poor and the destitute of Ayodhya. This
is how he earned the title of 'Gujjari'. His spiritual preceptor, Musa
'Ashiqan, who also lies buried in Ayodhya, would liken his distributing
food among the poor to sharing the love of God with all mankind.

Ayodhya also seems to have
been home to a number of spiritual successors of the renowned fourteenth
century Sufi of Delhi, Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya. The most important
of these was the famous Sufi Shaikh Nasiruddin Chiragh-i Dilli, who
lies buried in what is today New Delhi. Shaikh Nasiruddin was born in
Ayodhya, where he learnt the Qur'an from one Shaikh Shamsuddin Yahya
Awadhi. At the age of forty, he left Ayodhya for Delhi to live with
Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya. Yet, he would often return to Ayodhya to visit
his relatives and make disciples who, in turn, emerged as great Sufis
themselves. These included people such as Shaikh Zainuddin 'Ali Awadhi,
Shaikh Fatehullah Awadhi and 'Allama Kamaluddin Awadhi. Other khulafa
or spiritual deputies of Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya from Ayodhya included
Shaikh Jamaluddin Awadhi, Qazi Muhiuddin Kashani, Maulana Qawamuddin
Awadhi and Shaikh 'Alauddin Nilli.

Ayodhya is also home to the
shrine of a female Sufi saint, Badi Bua or Badi Bibi, sister of Shaikh
Nasiruddin Chiragh-i Dilli. She is said to have been particularly beautiful,
because of which many men offered to marry her. She, however, remained
single throughout her life, having devoted herself to serving God and
the poor. When she was asked why she refused to marry she would answer,
'I only love God and nothing else'. She is said to have been greatly
troubled by the local mullahs, perhaps because of her refusal to marry.
One day, so the story goes, the mullahs of the town appeared before
her, insisting that if she were really a pious Muslim she should follow
in the path of the Prophet Muhammad and get married. To this she replied
that she indeed did follow in the path of the Prophet, and offered to
get married but laid down the condition that her husband must be a truly
pious man.

The Kotwal, the chief police
officer of the town, dispatched a messenger to her asking for her hand
in marriage. Badi Bua declined to speak through a messenger and asked
the Kotwal to come before her himself. The Kotwal willingly complied.
When the Kotwal appeared before her, Badi Bua asked him why he wanted
to marry her. His reply was that he was in love with her eyes. Without
a moment's hesitation, so the story goes, she plucked out her eyes and
gave them to the Kotwal. The shocked Kotwal, realizing that Badi Bua
was no ordinary woman but a true devotee of God, repented at once and
begged her for mercy.

Stories of these and other
Sufis of the town are today almost completely forgotten, for there are
now hardly any Muslims left, almost all of Ayodhya's Muslim families
having fled in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992.
However, visible signs of centuries' old Muslim presence continue to
dot the town-crumbling minarets of ancient mosques, neglected graveyards
rapidly slipping under a dense cover of weeds, broken walls of what
must have once been grand Sufi lodges. Some of these structures came
down along with the Babri Mosque, vandalized by bloodthirsty Hindutva
mobs more than a decade ago. In the violence that followed even hallowed
Sufi shrines, such as the dargahs of Shah Muhammad Ibrahim, Bijli Shah
Shahid, Makhdum Shah Fatehullah, Sayyed Shah Muqaddas Quddus-i Ruh and
the Teen Darvesh, were attacked.

Today, some Sufi shrines
still survive in Ayodhya, continuing to be visited by local devotees
in search of solace. Strikingly, and despite the almost total takeover
of the town by votaries of Hindutva, several of them are carefully tended
to by local Hindus, particularly 'low' castes-a silent reminder of a
past now rapidly being forgotten and one that perhaps can never be relived
again.